Montini: 'Six war dead you should give thanks for'

One of the most popular forms of storytelling on the Internet is known as the “listicle.”

You’ve trolled such articles. Things like “Top Five Pizza Joints in Phoenix.” “Seven Best Ways to Lose Weight.” “Forty-One Saddest Country Songs.”

I was going to do a funny, quirky listicle about Thanksgiving until I got a call from a local veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He served in both places.) He calls now and again, having been acquainted with a soldier lost in Iraq about whom I wrote a newspaper column years ago. He called this week with a topic he thought I might turn into a Thanksgiving listicle.

He suggested the headline, "Six war dead you should give thanks for."

Which six casualties should I pick, I asked him.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Six is just a random number. People can't remember names. Mentioning a few is like mentioning them all, though. It reminds people that these guys were real people."

OK.

6. Rather than start with a lost soldier we do remember – Pat Tillman – there is Robert Zurheide Jr., a 20-year-old from Tucson who died in the war shortly before Tillman. He'd joined the Marines at about the time Pat and his brother Kevin joined the army. A high school teacher of Zurheide's told a reporter from the Tucson Citizen, "He didn't necessarily want to stand out in a crowd, be on the front page of the newspapers. He wouldn't have necessarily embraced it."

5. And there’s Sgt. Elijah Wong. He was a member of the 363rd Explosive Ordnance Company from Arizona, who was killed in 2004. His sister, Helga, told me, "My brother gave his life for his country. He willingly went to Iraq. He believed that he could save the world, and, in many ways, he did."

4. And Marine Sgt. Michael Marzano, who was killed in action in Haditha, Iraq, in May 2005. His mother, Margy Bons, who has worked tirelessly for military families in the years since her son's death, sent me a photograph of the two of them together. It’s on a wall facing my desk.

3. And 22-year-old Spc. Santos R. Armijo, known as "Bear," who was killed in the early days of the war near Baghdad. His mother, Tina Armijo, told me, "He was going to go over there, and so on that Memorial Day, we had a big cake, decorated red, white and blue. All his cousins were here ... He liked it very much."

2. And Brice Pearson, who was killed in Iraq in 2007, and whose mother, Beth, told me, "Why not have a moment of silence (to honor fallen soldiers) at every game? Every public event? At the beginning of every school day?"

1. And Daniel Somers, who served two tours in Iraq, suffered a traumatic brain injury and returned to the States with post-traumatic stress disorder. He took his own life -- a casualty of war if there ever was one.

I wrote newspaper columns about all of these individuals and dozens more. But I had to look up their names and stories in The Arizona Republic’s computer database. As time passes, I can’t say I’ll remember them.

But I’m thankful for them. All of them.